This Cool Dog Needs Your Help Finding His Way Through These Tough Mazes

Cool Dog ($0.99) by TLC Productions is a maze game where you must help Darby the Shiba find all of the white bones as fast as possible. The quicker you are, the more coins you collect and the more cool stuff you can unlock.

Players start with the easy maze and must collect all white bones on the course. Although they are called “easy,” these beginner courses are anything but. You are given about six seconds to look over the landscape and try to find the best possible route for Darby to take. You will quickly learn that there is no best route. The bones are spread all over the maze and many paths lead to a dead end. The best strategy is to try to avoid having to cover the same area you’ve already been to.

When you collect all of the bones and find the doghouse, you earn coins that you can use to unlock the next difficulty level of mazes, buy collars for Darby, or add another doggie to your pack.

There are power-ups that give Darby super speed or allow him to jump to any point in the maze one time. There are also tennis balls that you want to avoid. Darby can’t resist playing with them and if he comes across one, he won’t move for five seconds.

There are two additional dogs that cost a pretty penny, but increase player’s success at getting all of the bones as fast as possible. The black dog can run faster and doesn’t get distracted by tennis balls. The red dog can actually jump over barriers instead of wasting time trying to follow a specific path.

Each time you complete a maze you receive approximately 150 coins, although that number changes depending on how well you do. The red and black dogs cost 2,500 and 5,000 coins respectively. Since it would take a whole lot of tries to earn enough to buy one of the special dogs, you can get more coins through in-app purchases.

This is a cute game that children will really enjoy. It is somewhat repetitive for grown-ups, but I can’t say I didn’t play the game for way longer than I should have. The desire to collect more coins makes the replay value fairly high. This is not really a great game for adults, but it is a surefire winner for kids around 8-10 years-old.